Am I My Mother?

I swore the kitchen would never define me, but all I do is cook

My chic mother before marriage, children and kitchen duties.

As a teenager, I swore when I grew up, I would be nothing like my mother. It seemed to me her entire life revolved around the kitchen and food—buying groceries, preparing meals, cleaning up afterward, then planning for the next one. In between, she was always cooking and baking, sometimes for charitable functions, for family events, for holidays, for the company that seemed to arrive at our house with great regularity. She seemed to be in a perpetual dither about some dish that wasn’t ready in time, tables that weren’t properly set, my father’s displeasure that something was underdone or overdone. Well, I determined, my life would be different! The kitchen was not going to define me.

Fast forward multiple decades. Flora Stroud, née Flora Gordon, has been gone now for more than 20 years. Sadly, at the end of her life, she didn’t have the strength to prepare meals, to bake, even to set the table.

“What use am I?” she asked plaintively as her strength failed her in her final days.

“You can rest now, Mom,” I told her. “You deserve it.”

Small comfort to my mother, who had found her identity in that familiar square of space, moving between refrigerator and stove, cupboard and sink, like an agitated little bird hopping from branch to branch.

Her daughter, who for years defined herself as a journalist, later teacher, and lately, blogger, was Flora’s chief critic, never realizing—perhaps because her mother didn’t talk about it much and her daughter didn’t think to ask—how bright and accomplished her mother really was.

That woman—my mother—left school in her hometown of Glasgow, Scotland at 14 to go to work, along with her two older sisters, to help support her mother, Leah, my grandmother, after my grandfather died suddenly. She learned shorthand and became a secretary, a good job in those days. I once heard her say that one of the men she worked for helped to smuggle German Jewish refugees out of Europe. Apparently, he was also a bookie. I only wish I had asked her more about this story. She also worked for the British Empire Exhibition in 1938, a huge happening that was like a World’s Fair for the British Empire. My father, a lonely German-Jewish refugee who was studying engineering at a college in England’s East Midlands region, came to visit her there and was smitten.

My mother (left) as a working girl in Glasgow, with one of her sisters.

After being interned in Canada by the British as a “enemy alien” for six months, my father joined the British Army. He served six years, marrying my mother and fathering two kids—my older brothers, David and Denis—along the way. (I hope to write more on Dad’s experiences in a future post!).

When she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after the war with my father and two small boys in tow, my mother started all over again in a new land, far away from from all she knew. She made the best of it, had two more kids, me and my younger brother Michael, and eventually went back to school—taking classes one or two at a time over many years—to get a BA in psychology, with a minor in English, from San Jose State. I was so involved in my own life that it never dawned on me that Mom had gotten her degree until her final years. Typically, she was self-deprecating about the achievement.

“I didn’t do anything with it,” she said.

It’s sad to find yourself, as so many of us do, appreciating your parents retrospectively, often when you’re taking stock of your own life. To me, Flora Gordon Stroud was just Mom, and that mom was always stirring a pot, or chopping vegetables, or peering into the oven to see if the roast was done. And when she finally sat down at the end of the day, to read or to watch the evening news with my father, she nodded off in the chair. It didn’t seem like a very rewarding life to me.

But now, a year into this pandemic, and almost a year since I began this blog, I sense the fluttering of a small bird above my head as I check the chicken roasting in the oven, toss a salad, set the table. Flora’s there amused that I’m living the life I swore to her I never would. I was part of a generation that felt that a woman’s place was definitely not in the kitchen—or at least it didn’t have to be. And, I’m ashamed to say, I told her so.

Yes, Mom, I whisper. I cook a lot, as you did. And I don’t mind. It brings me comfort and gives me something to do when there’s so much that terrifies me and breaks my heart. I want a different world. Perhaps you did too when you were almost 9 months pregnant with your first child and hiding in a Glasgow bomb shelter while your husband was off fighting a war. Did you dream of the future dinner parties you and Dad would host that would be filled with laughter, friendship, family and really good food? When the world proved too much for you in later years, did you retreat into your kitchen and the whirring of that Harvest Gold KitchenAid mixer of which you were so proud?

I wish I’d asked. Meanwhile, here I am in my kitchen talking to you. I’ve never been able to duplicate the pound cake with candied ginger you made and served so often, and, believe it or not, I’ve never attempted to make the roast beef you made for Shabbat on Friday nights. You didn’t leave a recipe in that dilapidated marble notebook you kept so carefully, perhaps because you knew exactly how to do it. Maybe, just maybe I’ll give it a try someday.

Mom’s ginger pound cake is on the first page in her well-used recipe notebook. Sometimes she subbed raisins for the candied ginger. No exact measurements or baking instructions are included. Obviously Mom had it in her head.

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